SN Prime | July 9, 2012 | Vol. 2, No. 26 By now, all aficionados of physics news — and quite a few people who don’t know physics from phonics — have heard about the discovery of the Higgs boson. It’s the biggest news in the physics world ever to be tweeted. And it came after a long wait. For more than three decades, the Higgs has been physicists’ version of King Arthur’s Holy Grail, Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth, Captain Ahab’s Moby Dick. It’s been an obsession, a fixation, an addiction to an idea that almost every expert believed just had to be true. But d...

SN Prime | July 2, 2012 | Vol. 2, No. 25 Hollywood’s versions of heists are typically tales of glamour: A dream team, à la Ocean’s Eleven, meticulously plans and pulls off a multimillion-dollar caper. There are blueprints, elaborate alarm systems (circumvented by even more elaborate electronics), tunnels and false identities. The haul is enormous, permitting the criminals to abandon a life of crime. Well, I have some breaking news: In real life, bank heist stories are much more mundane. For starters, there’s the take. A new analysis of the economics of bank robberies in the Unite...

SN Prime | June 25, 2012 | Vol. 2, No. 24 Fans of T.S. Eliot are all aware that the world will end with a whimper. Fans of modern cosmology know that the world began with a bang, a big one. But the flow of time that transports the world from bang to whimper, from past to future, may itself neither begin nor end. In any event, time’s possible birth and death remain open questions, debated among physicists groping to understand the cosmos. It seems that the spacetime bubble that humankind has grandly designated “the universe” did have a violent beginning 13.7 billion years ago, but that...

SN Prime | June 18, 2012 | Vol. 2, No. 23 If you’ve ever tackled a jigsaw puzzle, you know how easy it is to lose some of the pieces and jam others into the wrong place. Now imagine that your jigsaw is the entire Earth, and your pieces fragments of continents. Lose a piece, and you’ve lost one of the planet’s major landmasses. Oops. That’s the literal puzzle facing geologists today: How have the continents shifted and reassembled themselves over eons? And what to do about the fact that pieces don’t always seem to fit together? The answers turn out to come from fields as di...

SN Prime | June 11, 2012 | Vol. 2, No. 22 For those of us who hate Christmas, it’s kind of comforting to hear that the world is going to end on December 21. If the jig truly is up, there’s no need to go through the tedious holiday rituals of shopping, making travel arrangements and festooning the boughs of doomed evergreens. What a wonderful life that would be. But alas, the apocalypse is not coming on the third Friday in December. To be fair, most of the originators and/or perpetuators of the 2012 prophecy, widely publicized by movies, books, TV documentaries and of course the Inte...

SN Prime May 7, 2012 | Vol. 2, No. 18 James Cameron has finally made it to The Abyss. In the director’s 1989 movie of that name, Ed Harris endured one submersible malfunction after another on his way down to the ocean’s bottom. But at least when he got there, he found some friendly glowing aliens. Cameron saw nothing so exciting on March 25, when in real life he descended to the ocean’s deepest point, the Challenger Deep in the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench. Still, Cameron’s record-breaking dive may herald a new era in ocean exploration. His journey, in a one-man lime-green...

SN Prime | May 28 – June 4, 2012 | Vol. 2, No. 22 One of the most chilling newcomers on the addiction scene is dirt cheap and easy to score. Known on the street as “Scream,” “Brain Freeze” and “Chunky Monkey,” this high is easy to ride — all it takes is $4 and a visit to your local grocer’s freezer section. You’ve probably encountered — and maybe even used — this latest menace yourself: ice cream. Breathless media reports likening ice cream to cocaine were spawned by a recent study. Brains of habitual ice cream eaters showed blunted responses to...

SN Prime May 21, 2012 | Vol. 2, No. 20 Andy Warhol’s much-touted quip that in the future everyone will have 15 minutes of fame was surprisingly prescient, given that the year was 1968. The Internet was in its nascent stages and wouldn’t reach the masses until decades later. CNN, the original 24-hour news channel, didn’t exist. And the creators of YouTube weren’t even a twinkle in their respective parents’ eyes (members of the entrepreneurial trio were born in 1977, 1978 and 1979). But for all his foresight, Warhol got one thing wrong. According to a new study, the average duration...

SN Prime May 14, 2012 | Vol. 2, No. 19 Life is always defying the boundaries of biology, or at least of biology textbooks. You don’t have to look far to find instances where books from other fields become relevant. Flip open a physics book, say, and you might find some especially pertinent examples in the chapter on magnetism. There you’ll learn that if you break a bar magnet in two, you get two magnets — the new ends created by the break just become new poles. And that if you heat a magnet up enough, then you have no magnet at all: High temperatures randomly jumble all the bits...

SN Prime April 30, 2012 | Vol. 2, No. 17 Google the phrase “I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse” and you’ll get more than 300,000 hits. Uttered by mob boss Vito Corleone in The Godfather, it’s the second most memorable quote in movie history, as rated by the American Film Institute. Even if you’ve never seen the movie, you’ve probably heard the phrase and perhaps even said it. Why is that? What makes some movie quotes so memorable? Answering that question is more challenging than you might think. After all, great quotes often come from great movies. Whether it�...